With its food trucks, design collectives and rehabbed downtowns, the Research Triangle -- the patch of North Carolina that is home to Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and 150,000 college students -- seems to be yet another hipster vibe factory. It's...

FOR more than a hundred years, the slender triangle formed by Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, N.C., has been the country's capital of tobacco. Today, as the cigarette industry wanes, the region is enjoying a bumper crop of a different sort, this one...